Give me your worst!

I'm looking for somebody to give me some really heavy feedback on my site. This is the final product after two years of do-it-yourself development. I've come a long way with .ASP and VB and have made huge accomplishments.

There is a decent amount of content, although you may not be able to tell unless you create an account. The account thing was designed because the website is there for friends and family. If you stop by to check it out, feel free to create an account. I don't care if you use a bogus email or whatever if you do, just let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Ooops! It'd help if I gave the URL!!

http://10106-party.homeip.net

OK - I've done alot of work on this site in the last couple weeks. My overall design is pretty bland as I don't seem to have a nack for creating custom web graphics. My biggest concern is functionality and ease of use. Maybe one day when I get a hair up my pants, I'll design (read: steal) some awesome graphics.

I've tried realy hard to make sure that related items are easily related, and easy to navigate. So what I'm looking for is someone to really test the limits of this site. I know of a few, and thats mostly due to my inexperience. So far I've done alot to make sure it all works properly.

Nice clean design, I think you should make the header bar even with the logo. I'd suggest making it go until the date then have a 45degree angle back down kinda like:

------------\ Date and time |
-----------------------------

I'm not really fond of the magenta highlighting on the links AND it's really hard to tell what are links and what arn't based on the fact that links and regular text are styled the same. You need to differeniate somehow.

I'd suggest using a lighter bluish-purple highlight color for the menu and possibly the body but you'd have to see how it looks.

Thanks, I'll take the link thing into advisement. As far as the colors go, I agree with the highlight color, but its difficult to find one that contrasts the text in every instance. Fortunately, I created themes and the ability to make the colors of the website whatever you want.

Very nice site. Clean, open, and the colors are not too disturbing. The graphics do need to be cleaned up a bit and a little sharper. Some of them have this white fuzz around it.

I agree with jinexile about the hard purple mouse over effect. You can't read the link when you hover over a visited link in the menu.

The headers for each post are jaggered and doesn't look quite as good and sharp. Also the italics are hard to read. Maybe because of the font you used or the size of the text. In fact all the tiny text is sort of hard to read. (using IE & 1024x768). I can tell by viewing the site in Netscape that it was made for IE. In netscape the navigation columns extends my screen. The center content and left columns are squished.

Thats funny.. upon going to the home page the above mention items is what I saw until I clicked on something it went back to normal.... Now I can't get it to do it again. oh well.....

For the search, I like the percentage of relevance. Except again the italics make it hard to read the brief post. Also 'match results' would be better if said 'relevant'. Or something to that effect.

Otherwise great work man...

I'll make a note to change the highlight color. It won't take any coding to change, just a preference. I know the font is not the best choice, its only Arial, and the size is awkward, but I've got a little exploration left to do on that. I've been trying to make slight adjustments here and there, but changing font sizes will require going through the code. Its high-time I changed everything to style sheets anyway.

You're absolutely right about the Netscape phenomenon. I'm not sure what the deal is there, as I thought I was following alot of basic rules. I've downloaded Opera and Netscape since I have started cleaning up my code, so hopefully I can start to alleviate those compatibility problems.

"Relevant" or "Relevancy" sounds better than "Match Results". I couldn't think of anything better. Thanks for that.

I've still got alot of "kinks" to work out. You probably didn't see my photo albums, the images on those are horrible. I use a generic thumbnail generator that allows me to create smaller images from the originals in batches. But the end result is horrible. The images (thumbnails) lose their clarity. I'm also running into "stack overflow" issues with my search engine. I haven't been able to come up with a way to get around it.

Thanks for the great review, keep them coming.

Ok - I've made the changes. I've changed the font sizes and cleaned up a few pages in the process. I also changed the highlight color, although its experimental at this point.

Now I just need to make it Netscape compatible. I'm not sure what the problem is, though. I'm a little perplexed... I think the word-wrapping seems to be the biggest problem.

The orange link highlight is not great but it is deffinetly better than the purple. The headers are much better - sharper. The italics is still something to be considered.

I noticed after click on a results from a search and then going back I'm presented with the dialog box asking if i was to resubmit the data. Is it possible to send your form via get rather than post?

Other that the above and the netscape issue, it's good in my book...

Your DOCTYPE declaration should be the very first thing in the html document, and it definitely should not be in the HEAD.

it looks pretty decent in Lynx, and looks great in Mozilla. I didn't look at it in IE, so I can't comment on that.

You have some really complex stuff going on in there with TABLEs, TRs and TDs.. however, there's not really any tables in here. As far as structure it's all divisions and lists.. but your defining it as tables and table cells.

Since so much of the css is shared by multiple pages, why not use an external style sheet, rather than put the same css in each individual page?

Not to contradict your statement regarding a CSS file, but I actually have a set of files that are vanilla to each page and are then #included. For instance, the top, the two sides and the bottom are each in their own files. This makes it easier in the event I need to change one stupid piece of code. So when the top file is called, all of my "top variables" (HTML REFs, BODY Values, CSS, etc.) is called.

I'm stil lhaving problems with Netscape. I don't understand why text isn't wrapping. I thought this was a default option when creating tables. Anyone know whats up?

Another problem I'm having with Netscape is the image in the upper-right corner. Does Netscape not support background images for tables? I thought this was universal too.

background image in table?! your DOCTYPE declaration says 4.01 strict. Perhaps Netscape is doing it correctly and the other browser (probably IE) that it "works" in doesn't. If you want to do things that aren't in accordance with the standards.. don't declare 4.01 strict.

Well, I've only added that DOCTYPE declaration more recently. I've been running the site faithfully in IE for 2 years now and haven't had any problems. Its only recently that I've been worried about cross-browser compatibility.

Nevermind - it was that stupid DOCTYPE declaration all along. I've probably been making work for myself too. Man that sucks.